“I’m a soldier, I’m not a martyr,” Carlos the Jackal announces in “Carlos,”Olivier Assayas’s fictionalization of the life and brutal times of the Marxist turned mercenary. Carlos delivers this line in 1975 during a re-creation of a heated exchange with the radical true believers with whom he has taken OPEC ministers hostage. It was one of the more spectacular operations in his career as a self-professed professional revolutionary, and he had carefully dressed for the part in a black beret and leather jacket meant to invoke Che Guevara, pop martyr supreme.

The distinction between soldier and martyr is crucial for what it says about Carlos, whose revolutionary rhetoric will grow increasingly hollow as the movie goes on, and for what it says about his time and our own, with its armies of soldiers and martyrs. Like Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” a 2008 gloss on Ernesto Guevara, and “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” a 2008 drama about West German terrorists, “Carlos” examines left-wing militancy from the inside out. Although these movies take place in the past, they often speak more potently to the Sept. 11 world than most mainstream fiction films that try to address terror head-on, partly because each is set at the intersection of idealism and violence.

Hollywood movies don’t often cross that intersection, and even nominally political films prefer to keep idealism and violence separate and neatly embodied by clear-cut heroes and villains. In the 2007 studio release “Rendition” Jake Gyllenhaal plays a young analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency whose conscience is stirred to action when, on an assignment abroad, he witnesses the torture of a prisoner who’s been wrongly suspected of terrorism and secretly detained. The film ends with the analyst freeing the prisoner and reaching out to a newspaper to spread the truth to the world, which would be more stirring if there was evidence that news reports about such wartime horrors inspired more than well-meaning movies.

A similar idealist gesture caps “Green Zone,” which came out in March and stars Matt Damon as an American military officer who, after failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and discovering that the intelligence he used was cooked, also contacts the media. For all their differences, “Rendition” and “Green Zone,” like most mainstream fare, turn on the commercial imperative that the bad times have to come to an end when the movies do, preferably with a pricked conscience or some righteous payback. Movies like these don’t just come to their inevitable end, say, by dropping a curtain on the whole mess and letting you stagger toward the exit with your own conclusions. They insist that everyone learn a lesson, the viewer most of all.

Although the terrorist born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez preaches his own gospel in “Carlos,” Mr. Assayas refrains from doing the same. There are no teachable moments in his movie. Throughout Carlos enjoys the spotlight that warmed him and — with the lovers who protected him, the journalists who covered him and the dictators who hired him — helped turn him into a myth. (“Saddam,” a Hussein toady coos seductively, “talks about you a great deal.”) Nothing if not contradictory, Carlos was an anti-imperialist who liked luxury and bought the Che-style beret he wore for the OPEC raid in a Vienna boutique, completing his look with a Beretta and a leather jacket from Pierre Cardin. If Mr. Assayas’s Carlos looks like a star it’s because the real man was.

Carlos certainly often behaves more like one of the bad boys of cinema than one of the severe jihadists who show up every so often in the movies waving machine guns and chanting about God. Mr. Assayas plays on that familiarity, partly by casting a lead whose good looks play into the common assumption (sometimes shared by critics) that the leading character, especially if he’s a brooding beauty, is not just the story’s hero but also its moral center. But while “Carlos” often looks like an Hollywood-style action film, like “Che” and “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” it also cannily employs some of the devices — including a sense of ambiguity and ambivalent characters — of the classic art cinema.

Like Carlos, the title character in “Che,” Mr. Soderbergh’s two-part, more than four hour epic, is certainly self-aware of his own image, as when, dressed in his soldier’s uniform, he asks for a touch of powder before being interviewed on American television. The movie is largely organized around significant battles — first in Cuba and then in Bolivia where Che was killed — which gives the whole thing the feel of an extended war movie. There’s a certain redundant quality to the narrative, as one jungle battleground is displaced by another, but the emphasis on grinding action also expresses the passion of Che, who, at one point, explains that what motivates the revolutionary is “love.”

This idea appears in “Socialism and the New Man,” one of Che’s final and oft-quoted essays. (“Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.”) You hear a somewhat differently translated version of this line over images of Che and his men hiding in the Cuban jungle, their faces slicked with sweat and guns at the ready, seconds before they ambush a squad of soldiers. (One of Che’s men is played by Édgar Ramírez, the star of “Carlos.”) As he does throughout his movie, Mr. Soderbergh delivers this juxtaposition between love and bullets without overt comment, a dissatisfying tactic for those seeking a verdict instead of a diagnosis.

Photo

Reese Witherspoon and Peter Sarsgaard in “Rendition,” the 2007 political film directed by Gavin Hood.Credit
Sam Emerson/New Line Cinema

With “Che,” Mr. Soderbergh eschews blunt ideological argument and instead offers up a topical and resonant image of a near-messianic revolutionary leader surmounting seemingly impossible odds in inhospitable terrain. In “Che” the world smolders, as if in preparation for the coming conflagrations. In “Carlos” and “The Baader Meinhof Complex” it burns. Some of that heat comes from their resonance: both fill in some prehistory of contemporary revolutionary movements in the Middle East and work as cautionary tales about the perversions of idealism. An ideologue turned dedicated mercenary, bungler, opportunist and relic, Carlos is absurd and murderously real, much like the young guerrillas in “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” which feverishly begins with a cry to arms and a quote from Che and devolves into sadism and ideological squabbling.

In turning history into story, all three movies exclude material that might get in the way of their chosen narratives. Mr. Soderbergh put an intermission between Cuba and Bolivia instead of the military trials that Che presided over and that left accused war criminals tried in the morning and dead by the afternoon. Mr. Assayas overlooks the Swiss Nazi François Genoud, a friend of Carlos the Jackal’s and later a source of financial support. Mr. Assayas perhaps omitted Genoud (who died in 1996 at 81) because a friendship between a Nazi and a self-proclaimed Marxist, who were united by their anti-Zionism and support of militant Palestinian causes, might have sent the movie off the rails.

Genoud does make a hair-raising appearance in Barbet Schroeder’s 2007 documentary “Terror’s Advocate,” as an associate of Jacques Vergès, a lawyer whose anti-colonialist loathing is so virulent and whose politics are so convoluted that he defended both the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (a k a. the Butcher of Lyon) and Carlos the Jackal. Mr. Schroder coolly lays out the connections between Mr. Vergès’s left-wing and right-wing associates, largely letting the historical players speak for themselves amid archival images and snippets from “The Battle of Algiers,” Gillo Pontecorvo’s influential 1966 cri de coeur about the Algerian fight for independence. Mr. Schroeder doesn’t embellish the facts with commentary; he doesn’t need to with such far-out, freaky material. Mr. Assayas should have bit.

Granted, it might have been tricky fitting in Genoud between the swaggering violence and pliant chicks, and throwing a Nazi into the mix would have complicated Carlos’s casually voiced anti-Zionism. Even so, as time passes and the blood rises, Mr. Assayas builds an argument about terrorism that strips the glamour off it inch by inch, specifically in scenes of people being executed, including the pregnant wife of a French embassy employee who opens her door to the assassin who kills her, her unborn child and husband. At that moment, the vestigial idealism that clung to the revolutionary struggles Carlos once signed on with is snuffed out, extinguished through an act of intergenerational murder that speaks to the legacy of terrorism-without-end and foreshadows an age of car bombs, high body counts and nihilistic, annihilating violence.

It’s a grim moment in a movie that, for all its sexy guitar licks and hot revolutionary babes, is nothing if not tragic. In their different ways and with divergent ends, “Carlos,” “Che” and “The Baader Meinhof Complex” explore the extremes of left-wing ideologies that, with the end of the Cold War, exited the world stage, leaving the mainstream left to drift toward the center. If these movies can tell that story so persuasively it’s partly because they belong to the past while the revolutionary movements represented in a film like “Green Zone” belong to a present with no end in sight.

A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 2010, on Page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: Beyond Bullets And Berets, Life in Wartime. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe